Kibbles & Bytes Blog

  • MAC TREAT #188: Open Your Favorite Apps Automatically

    While it is not often necessary to shut down your computer, it is not a bad idea to do so from time to time. For example, I am flying to Ohio today and will be shutting my MacBook Pro down completely before I send it through the scanner. Also, for a number of reasons, we shut our computers down every night here at Small Dog.

    This means that I need to re-open all the programs that I always leave open each time I start back up. While not an especially time consuming task, it is a little annoying to have to do this every time. Thanks to today’s Mac Treat, I will be annoyed no more.

    In order to automatically open programs upon start-up (or when you log in to your user account), follow these steps:

    # Go to the Apple menu and select *System Preferences*.
    # Click on *Users & Groups* in the *System* section.
    # Click on *Login Items*.
    # Hit the + (plus) button.
    # Find the application you want to add (the *Applications* folder is probably where they all are), highlight it and hit the *Add* button.
    # Repeat for all applications you want to add.

  • _Dear Friends,_

    Labor Day Weekend is upon us, and while Small Dog Electronics has traditionally been closed on Labor Day. However, in the world of retail, that is not possible and is actually against our lease in at least one store. Manchester, NH and S. Burlington, VT locations will be open while Waitsfield is closed.

    We use CTO (Combined Time Off) at Small Dog Electronics so our workers don’t really lose the holiday — they have the ability to take a day off when they want. We combine vacation, sick, holiday, and personal days into CTO and let our employees manage their time. I really don’t want to be policing sick days or personal days. We have only a few restrictions — we demand that vacations be taken as a block of time, not a day here and a day there, and we ask that our employees schedule their time off in advance whenever possible.

    Labor Day celebrates the economic and social contributions of workers but is also the unofficial end of summer. The local snack bar at the Maynard Farm closes, football season begins and schools are back in session. It is also the start of new product announcements, too. Apple has something scheduled for September 12th and while it is not a product announcement, Small Dog Electronics will have a special press conference and announcement next Wednesday in Rutland, Vermont. We will report on both in Kibbles next week!

    Do you back up your data? I was talking to my retail managers this morning about how we should be evangelists about backing up data. That is always one of the questions I ask customers, how are you going to back up your data? Do you know that hard drives spin at high RPM and that they fail frequently? With a Mac, backing up your data cannot be easier. Time Machine is a life-saver. (See our G-DRIVE Mini special below.)

    I love telling about the time I was vacationing in Mexico and had my MacBook Pro stolen from my hotel room. I lost a couple of pictures that I had uploaded to that Mac, but once I was back in Vermont (with my check from the hotel), I grabbed a new MacBook Pro, hooked it up to my Time Machine backup drive and I was up and operating with all of my data in a very short time. As my friend David Lerner from Tekserve in NYC says, “may you have 1,000 backups and never need one…”

  • TT SPECIAL: $30 off Epson WP-4020

    Enjoy lower print costs and the *”World’s fastest auto two-sided print jobs”* with the Epson WorkForce Pro WP-4020 Inkjet Printer. The WP-4020 boasts “50% lower printing costs vs. color laser.”

    It also sports built-in wireless networking and direct mobile printing. Note that this special price is only valid through August 31!

  • TT SPECIAL: $10 off G-Connect 500GB Wireless Hard Drive

    The G-Connect Wireless Hard Drive is a storage solution that will:

    * Store data that can be streamed or download to iOS device
    * Act as a Wi-Fi Internet access point for five+ users
    * Extend the storage of your iOS device including music, movies, images and documents

    iPad and iPhone apps are available for quick and convenient access, and password-protection is available in case you need to lock down your data.

  • Bring Back the Countdown

    I’m not a mobile Mac user, although I do have an iPad and iPhone, so I was surprised to learn that Apple removed the battery life countdown timer in Lion and Mountain Lion. It now runs like iOS with just the battery percentage. For iPads, iPhones and iPods, this isn’t a big deal, but with a laptop it may be an issue.

    Thankfully, there is an app out there that will bring it back. “*Battery Time*”:https://batterytimeapp.com/beta/ is currently in beta status but appears to work just fine. It’s a no frills, super basic app that does just what it says it does: “Show the remaining time your MacBook (or any Apple portable) can run on its battery.”

    As with any software that tweaks the operating system, use at your own risk.

  • No Linen For You!

    There are some users that really don’t like Apple’s use of the linen pattern background in their recent operating systems. During my daily blog reading I came across an article on Cult of Mac that shows how to customize it, at least in Notification Center.

    You’ll need to go to the following folder: *System/Library/CoreServices* and find the Notification Center app. Right click on the application and select *Show Package Contents* from the menu. This will enable you to see the ‘guts’ of Notification Center. Let me warn you now that altering any of the contents of this application may cause the app to stop functioning. Proceed at your own risk!

    Look for a folder called Resources, and in there, you will fins a file called linen.tiff. This is the picture file the OS uses for the background. Copy this to another location so that you have a backup and can restore the file if you want it back. To change it, you just choose another image, rename it to linen.tiff and replace the original file in the Resources folder.

    To activate the image you can either restart your computer or go to Activity Monitor and quit Notification Center. The next time you open the Notification Center panel, the image should be there.

    You can “*read the original article here.*”:http://www.cultofmac.com/182609/change-os-xs-notification-center-background-video-how-to/

  • Wi-Fi Diagnostic Tool Update

    Since writing the article on the hidden Wi-Fi diagnostic tool in Lion and Mountain Lion, I’ve gotten a few emails from people who haven’t been able to find the CoreServices folder in Lion.

    Here’s a trick on how to get to folders that are hidden: Within Finder, go to the *Go* menu and choose *Go to Folder.* In the window that opens up, enter the following: /system/library/CoreServices

    This should get you to the right folder. You can also use this trick to get to your hidden personal Library folder. Just enter: ~/Library

  • Hello All,

    So…now that the heat has abated a bit, we can concentrate on hurricane season again. We are at ‘I’ (for Isaac), which means we have seen quite a few tropical storms and hurricanes already. I’m really hoping we avoid any direct hits this year–many places in Vermont are still struggling to rebuild from Irene, which hit last year, and there are many areas where the geography has been completely rewritten. I think I would find it difficult to endure hurricanes and hurricane damage every year. People adapt to the most amazing things!

    The big tech news this week is Apple’s victory over Samsung in the courts. It was decided that Samsung stole patented ideas from Apple for interfacing with phones and tablets, including the ‘pinching’ and ‘opening’ gestures which zoom images in and out. All the buzz is about whether this decision will hamper innovation or inspire other companies to seek their own solutions to make their touch interfaces work. There are plenty of persuasive arguments for both sides, really, including one that argues that certain gestures are like the steering wheel, where form follows function so closely that changing it could render the device almost useless.

    Imagine if Henry Ford had received a patent for the round steering wheel and anyone who wanted a Chrysler needed to use a square or triangle. Or two levers. The argument could be made that this would have spurred innovation in other car makers and therefore driven competition in the market. But it could also be argued that the round steering wheel (like pinching) is such an integral part of car design itself that exclusively granting its use to one company would kill competition and innovation. In any case, I’m sure the appeals will drag on for years. And I will still be reading on and pinching my iPad, unless someone makes something better.

    Thanks for reading!

    Liam
    “*liam@smalldog.com*”:mailto:liam@smalldog.com

  • The 11-inch 1.6GHz i5 MacBook Air (circa 7/2011) is now an extra $20 off our previous low price of $949.99. Get yours now,…